With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia eBook

British Consul Nash kindly entertained Colonel and
Madame Frank and myself, and generally helped me in
the organisation of this end of my campaign.
He did not think much of my objective, but he helped
all the same.

CHAPTER XVII

MY CAMPAIGN

I held my first meeting in the repairing shop at Irkutsk
at 3 P.M., March 4. It was a big crowd of working
men and women. The Russian women work on the
railways in such employments as carriage and wagon
cleaners, snow and ice shovellers, and even repairing
gangs on different sections of the line have a sprinkling
of the fair sex.

This audience listened to an explanation of the rise
of the trade union movement in England with the greatest
attention. The large majority accepted the proposition
I tried to expound, that no question could be settled
by the disputants merely killing each other off; but
there were present about half a dozen members of the
International World Workers, slouch-hatted, unshaven,
and exactly true to type as seen at meetings in East
London, Liverpool or Glasgow. These were not workmen
employed on the railway; one kept a barber’s
shop, one was a teacher, one a Russian doctor, and
one a Russian solicitor; but they were the officials
of the only form of union that exists in Russian Siberia,
a revolutionary circle composed of the very worst
elements in the towns, bound together by one common
purpose, the spoliation and assassination of every
decent man, whether bourgeois or workman, who refuses
to support a policy of anarchy. These five or
six determined ruffians formed a kind of Blood Brotherhood,
and behind a veil of anonymity issued mandates to,
and in the name of, the Russian workmen, which, backed
up by a system of murderous terrorism, the workmen
were powerless to resist. It was quite a usual
thing to find each morning dead men of all classes
in the streets who had been murdered during the night
by members of these circles. There was no system
of law or police; every vestige of justice was uprooted,
and these crimes went unpunished. The irony of
it was that these acts were avowedly done in the interest
of progress and reform and in the sacred name of Labour!

The Irkutsk Circle asked questions which were not
calculated to elicit a single fact connected with
labour, either in Russia or England, but were just
the usual clap-trap monkey business, such as:

“Why should we be satisfied with half, when
we have the bourgeoisie down and can take all?”

“Why should we allow law to be re-established,
which was always used by the few to rob the many?”

“Surely it is less unjust to allow the many
to continue to rob the few?”

“In destroying the landlord and capitalist are
not the Russian proletariat merely taking back its
own property?”

“Is it not a fact that the more systematically
and effectively we annihilate the bourgeois and landlord
class, and all the institutions belonging to them,
the easier it will be to erect the new order?”